Last Night in Twisted River

By John Irving

To be an avid reader of John Irving is to court disappointment. The very attributes that make much of his work so enjoyable - his eccentric sense of humor, the vividness he brings to certain locales and situations, his love of sweeping narratives rich in thematic meaning - are also the ones that cause some of his novels to be so irritating.

His new, 12th novel, "Last Night in Twisted River," uses familiar bits of Irving business - sudden tragedy, haunted writers, semi-incestuous affairs and, yes, bears - but this time their cumulative effect works to the book's great advantage. This is probably his most controlled novel since "A Widow for One Year," a sprawling epic that covers 50 years and a wide range of settings, yet manages to cohere into a satisfying tale of loss and redemption.

"Last Night in Twisted River" opens in 1954, in northern New Hampshire's Coos County, where the drowning of a young Canadian boy in a log-filled river serves as a harbinger of more heartbreak for widowed camp cook Dominic Baciagalupo and his 12-year-old son, Daniel. Dominic is having an affair with the local constable's girlfriend, and one night Danny mistakes her for a rampaging bear and accidentally kills her. Fearing retribution from the brutal lawman, the father and son are forced to flee, their backs watched by a hard-bitten logger named Ketchum.

Over the next five decades, Dominic and Danny travel throughout New England and Canada, settling for a time in various cities, pursuing their educations and careers. Dominic continues his employment as a cook and falls in love with the mother of the boy who drowned in the river. Danny becomes a writer, marries unwisely and raises a son of his own. But no matter how comfortable they become in any one place, the cook and his son can't escape the long shadow of Constable Carl, who becomes only more dangerous as the years go by, despite the watchful eye of Ketchum.

Irving constructs a cunning narrative structure for "Last Night in Twisted River." The novel's six sections each leap forward in linear chronology, but the details about the intervening years are left to be delivered in fits and starts. This hopscotching strategy allows for multiple layers of suspense and irony as Irving doles out his revelations about Danny, his father and Ketchum. It's an impressive feat of sustained narrative craftsmanship, reminiscent of the tour de force "Walt Catches Cold" chapter and its aftermath in "The World According to Garp."

Irving does, however, indulge some of his least attractive habits in "Last Night in Twisted River." It's not enough that Danny grow up to be a hugely best-selling author, but his lover and collaborator must be an Academy Award-winning screenwriter to boot. In the post-2001 chapters, the characters' assessments of the Bush years offer no surprises at all. And some readers will be put off by the circumstances of one character's death and by another's fixation on amputating one of his limbs. But these are quibbles. Irving restrains himself before he turns any of his creations into grotesques.

This is a fitting time of year for the release of "Last Night in Twisted River." It is very much an autumnal book, focused on remembrance and regret. At the end, Danny muses "how stories were marvels - how they simply couldn't be stopped." Arriving late in his career, Irving's "Last Night in Twisted River" is a marvel, and his admirers can be glad he wasn't deterred from its completion.